B008J4PNHE EBOK (31 page)

“Well, where is she?”

“Bellevue.”

 ■ ■ ■ 

That summer her mother had begun to lock Mina in her bedroom at night. “For your safety,” said Sandra mysteriously, and refused to discuss the issue.

Mina’s counteroffensive was to go on Happiness Strike.

Each evening when Mina came home from school, she would do her homework and then curl up on the tile floor of the kitchen to sleep. To Sandra’s pleas that Mina sit down in a chair, or watch television, or have a bath, the daughter replied, “My place is to suffer.” At mealtime with her mother, Mina stopped eating anything except raw vegetables and would drink only tap water, refusing the Brita. Mina began to donate her possessions—favorite clothes that she had designed and made herself, beloved books and keepsakes, jewelry—to passersby outside their building. “Here is something I adore,” she’d say, and press a pair of shoes on a stranger.

Finally, when Sandra observed her daughter giving away the tattered baby blanket that had wrapped Mina on the day of her birth, she crumpled. “Why are you doing this?”

Mina told the little girl to whom she’d awarded the blanket to run along. “Be good to Blankie.” Mina turned to her mother. “Because there’s no point in even attempting to be happy so long as you insist on treating me like an inmate.”

(“You are so mean,” said Sam. He began to check the beer bottles around his bed, hoping for a partial.

“Happiness Strike is a last resort.” Mina shrugged. “But sometimes that’s what’s needed.”

Sam tossed back the last quarter of a two-day-old white ale.)

Sandra surrendered and that night left Mina’s door unlocked. The Happiness Strike was unofficially called off. It seemed that their problems were at an end . . .

. . . Until a few days later, when Mina caught her mother lecturing a dead beagle named Horatio. The beagle had been elderly, the property of a client, a professor of poetics who said everything twice and who fed the dog scraps so he was terribly fat. While on a walk, Horatio had paused to sniff a late daisy. Sandra glanced away. She looked back, and the beagle had four legs up in the air. He was already cooling.

“It’s a twisted game, Mina. Don’t give him the satisfaction. He just wants attention.” Sandra was on the couch in their living room. The dog lay in her lap. His tongue dangled out, and his eyes were white. A fly buzzed around his black nose.

(Sam slung a bottle cap at his sister. “Oh, come on. I don’t want to hear that. That’s enough.”

“Sorry, Sam. That’s nature,” said Mina. “Everybody croaks.”)

“Don’t you? Don’t you, you little devil?” Sandra stroked the beagle’s dappled forehead. “Booth, Booth, Booth. What will you think of next?”

Mina briskly found a canvas tote and returned to the living room. She held out the open bag. “Hand over Horatio’s corpse. Right now.”

Sandra frowned but deposited the dead dog in the bag. At the poetics professor’s apartment, Mina set the animal on the rug, arranged him as peacefully as his stiffening body would allow, and slipped out before she was noticed.

Back at home, she explained to her mother that they would have to see a doctor, and though it might seem scary, it was for the best. Sandra pulled a few strands of her hair, a mix of blond and gray, and rolled her eyes up to see them. “That dog was not dead, sweetie.”

“And I will always love you,” said Mina. “No matter what.”

Her mother began to bawl. “Promise?”

Mina sat down and hugged her, murmuring that everything would be okay, that in the long run she would feel better.

A week passed, and Sandra took the lithium the doctor prescribed. Mina stayed home from school and kept a close watch. Her mother was subdued but balanced. One afternoon she made banana bread; another, she cleaned the cabinets above the stove for, as far as her daughter could recall, the first time ever. Mina asked how she felt, and the smile Sandra produced was tentative. “I feel like I’m manning the controls to myself. Does that make any sense?”

“Is that a good feeling?”

“I don’t know,” said Sandra. “I made banana bread. That’s a positive sign, I suppose, isn’t it?”

When Mina returned home from school that Thursday, there was a smell of smoke in the hallway outside the apartment. She rushed inside to discover fire licking from the edges of the stove. Sandra had put a pile of old photographs of her and Booth, several child-support check stubs, and a Manhattan area phonebook to bake at 375.

After Mina extinguished the fire with a pot of water, she asked her mother what she’d done with her pills.

“They—
went
.” The rueful manner in which Sandra shook her head suggested that the pills had departed according to their nature, like grown ducklings leaving the nest.

“If you don’t take them,” said Mina, “I am not staying.”

“I am your mother,” said Sandra.

“Goodbye,” said Mina.

Her mother stuck out her tongue and rolled over on the couch, showing her back.

Mina packed her things, went down to the sidewalk, and called Peter Jenks. “Hi, bastard. Isn’t your father a big-shot shrink?”

“What do you want with my father? Does your insane brother want to go threaten him with a DVD? Or are you hoping he can ungay me or something? You can forget about that one, Mina. He’s a doctor, not a wizard.” Since the visit from Sam and the breakup, Peter was being combative.

(“The nerve of this kid, right? Which, naturally, makes me love the bastard more than ever,” said Mina.

“Naturally,” said Sam. All the other bottles had turned out to be empty.)

Mina told Peter to be quiet. She needed his help, she said, and because his deciding he was gay had annihilated her soul, it was the least he could do.

His spine held. “No. I’m on to you.”

“Please?”

“Fine.”

Mina gave him the rundown on Sandra’s condition, and Peter promised to get his father to at least talk to her mother. “But you might as well know, I’m seeing someone.”

“Who?”

“David Lima. You know him? From Pre-Calc?”

She did know David Lima. He had shiny black hair, fuzzy sideburns, and lived inside a Killers T-shirt—a very cute boy, no question.

(Sam lay flat on his bed and spoke through a pillow drawn tight to his face. “He does sound cute.”)

 ■ ■ ■ 

“So I congratulated the bastard, because what choice did I have? After that, I texted you and came over here. And now Peter just texted me that his old man has taken Sandra to Bellevue for evaluation. Which brings us to the present.”

Sam continued to lie with the pillow over his face. “I’m sorry, Mina. It’s not your fault. You know that, right?”

“Which part? The insane mother or the gay ex-boyfriend who hates me?”

“Both. Neither. Any of it.”

“Don’t worry, Sam. We don’t have to get a place.”

It was hot and black under the pillow. He loved Mina, he did, but he couldn’t imagine not disappointing her, which made him feel depressingly Boothlike. “Mina, look, it’s not that. This is just a lot to think about right now, you know?”

“Sure,” she said. “I know.”

Sam was tempted to bring up their father—new-and-improved, post-Awakening Booth—and ask why she didn’t give him a call, see if the old man might be interested in being, you know, an actual parent. That would have been petty, though, and he needed to be better than that. If he was going to let her down, he at least ought not kick her.

He flipped off the pillow to tell her that they would figure everything out in the morning, once they’d had some rest, but Mina had left. Down the hall, the bathroom door shut.

Sam’s first waking thought was that the police were calling to tell him they’d apprehended the recurring vagrant. His second thought was no, it couldn’t be that because he’d never gotten around to calling them about the crazy man with the large knife in the first place. He scrabbled around the bedside table, scattering the stack of envelopes again and tipping a cup of water clattering to the floor, before his hand settled on the rattling cell phone.

It was a sext: a photo of Polly’s left nipple, the one with the freckle at two-fifteen. This was followed by a question:

Sam confessed:

He pushed himself up into a sitting position against the wall. His answer had already begun to stiffen.

Polly sent another picture of her breast, this time being squeezed by one of her hands.

Sam’s next response came more slowly because it was one-handed.

Perhaps twenty seconds later, the phone vibrated with an actual call. “ ‘And then some’?” asked Polly in a whisper. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Sam groaned. “It means—”

“Don’t you come! I just caught a glimpse into the very bottom of your filthy mind, and I’m curious.”

He hissed, his lungs full, the breath at the back of his throat.

“I’m serious! Let go of your penis! I’m not messing around!”

“Dammit.” Sam let go of himself. Opposite his bed, a splash of reflected streetlight found the framed photograph on the bureau. The photograph was of his mother, Alison Deidre Byrne Dolan, taken sometime before Sam was born. In it she wore an army helmet, a canary-yellow sundress, and a cool smile.

Sam swung out of bed and went to the bureau. He gently placed the framed picture facedown. By the time he returned to bed, both his hard-on and his desire to humor Polly had waned considerably.

“I’m waiting. ‘And then some,’ Sam? Be specific, you pervert. I’m starting to get excited here. Are you planning to screw me with, what, a sex toy of some kind? Or are we talking about something truly deviant, like a crutch or an umbrella or something?”

“It didn’t mean anything, Polly.”

“It meant something. It always means something.” She said this in a singsong that reminded Sam of Rainer—it was her lullaby voice. In turn, he thought of Jo-Jo and those fatal thighs.

Even after Polly got engaged to Jo-Jo, she and Sam never ceased having
phone sex on a semi-weekly schedule. (They had real sex on a few occasions as well, sometimes in a hotel, sometimes in one of the dressing rooms at an outlet mall off the turnpike north of the city.) She nearly always called him, which was exciting for Sam but only as long as the phone sex lasted. He usually started to suffer pangs of bleakness before the semen on his fingers had cooled. It didn’t feel like a game anymore; it didn’t feel like a sexy secret anymore; it felt like a bad habit.

“What if Rainer finds out?” asked Sam. This was something he had been doing a lot lately—testing out new lines of argument for why they should stop doing what they were doing—although usually, he got to ejaculate first.

“That’s silly. How would Rainer ‘find out’? He’s a baby. Rainer can barely roll over. Believe me, as long as he gets his share of tit, he’s very accepting.”

“I mean what if he finds out later. How’s he going to look at you?”

“Oh, gee! How will my son look at me if we get caught? Let me think. Do you think he’ll look at me—oh no!—
like a whore
?” she asked.

“I didn’t say that.”

“No, you didn’t.” Polly inhaled. “I did. Now mind your own business.”

“I’m sorry.” Part of the fix of the thing was that so long as she was the only one who had anything to lose, any argument he attempted was going to come off as condescending or, worse, fatherly. What was odd was that for once, the awareness that he was not responsible for something was of no comfort to Sam. Polly was his friend. Just because he was hopeless didn’t mean he wanted her to suffer.

“It’s okay. Forget it.” She inhaled again. “Are you going to tell me your dirty fantasy or what?”

“If it meant anything, it meant, like, ‘extra-hard.’ Like, I’d bone you extra-hard. You know?”

“Really? That’s it?” Polly asked, and Sam said, “Yeah, pretty much,” and Polly said that was unimaginative and a turn off, and she expected better from him, although she didn’t know why. “Don’t call fucking ‘boning’. It’s repugnant.”

“Sorry,” said Sam.

“Oh, whatever. It’s okay. Let’s just forget this one.” She was putting her jammies back on now. “Well, so what else is going on?”

Sam found his boxers and wearily stepped into them one foot at a time. His adrenaline was ebbing. On top of that, rebuffing Polly always left him feeling as though he’d withstood a siege; the walls had held, but they were shot full of cannonball holes, and there were piles of the mortally wounded all over the courtyard groaning out their last. Her assault took a toll. “It hasn’t been the best night.”

“Please don’t tell me,” said Polly.

“I saw Jo-Jo on TV in his Yankee Mobile.”

“I hate that stupid car. It turns over like a 747 and wakes up the baby every time. It’s a dumb dick on wheels.”

“I didn’t know he actually owned it.”

“There’s all kinds of things you don’t know about my husband and my marriage, Sam. Because it’s private. So quit prying. Find your own husband.”

“That’s all I’ve got,” he said.

“Not much here, either,” Polly said. “Jo-Jo and I watched a funny show. It was about this poor dope who got locked in his panic room on Y2K.” She proceeded to recount the narrative of the episode of
Secrets Only Dead Men Know
.

Sam told her he had seen the same show, it had made him feel guilty, and if there was nothing else, he should probably go back to sleep. Polly informed him that if he didn’t do something to improve his outlook, one of these days she was going to find someone else with whom to masturbate.

“I met someone tonight,” Sam said. It just slipped out. He left out the part about how he had crawled through a bathroom window to escape from that someone.

“Really?” asked Polly after a pause. Then she said, “Oh, sugar. Rainer’s crying,” and hung up.

By the time Sam returned from taking a leak in the bathroom—an arduous round trip that involved negotiating a hallway blocked by a freestanding hammock from an outdoor furniture company, several family-size tin cans of gumballs from a party supplier, and a scattering of stuffed animals from a toy maker—he had forgotten again about the vagrant with the knife.